This black and white photograph pictures the artist leaning against a graffiti wall and turning towards the camera

Susannah Appleby

BA (Hons) Photography + Visual Media
XXXistential

XXXistential brings together a body of medium format photographs that examine power, identity and desire within Queer BDSM and Kink community in Ireland. This series has developed around three subjects — a bisexual Femdom, her horse and her bisexual submissive. A soundscape composed and designed by Peter Power accompanies the photographs, narrated by the Femdom in her own words. Her voice is placed in dialogue with the photographic series, asserting her position as both subject and author.
All photographs were processed in the darkroom — a practice that speaks to questions of privacy, intimacy, and the insistence on authorial control at every stage of the work’s production.

This black and white medium format photograph is a portrait on the Femdom and her horse. The Femdom is in focus in the midground and the horse is out of focus in the foreground. She is wearing a black leather jacket and jewellery on her neck. One necklace says “I love Jesus” and the other is a miniature vibrator.
This black and white medium format photograph is a portrait on the Femdom and her horse. The Femdom is in focus in the midground and the horse is out of focus in the foreground. She is wearing a black leather jacket and jewellery on her neck. One necklace says “I love Jesus” and the other is a miniature vibrator.
This black and white medium format photograph features a masked submissive and the head and neck a white horse. They face each other, standing side-on from the camera in front of a plastic dustsheet backdrop inside an old barn. The light floods in from the left, via gaps in the roofing out of shot.
This black and white medium format photograph features a masked submissive and the head and neck a white horse. They face each other, standing side-on from the camera in front of a plastic dustsheet backdrop inside an old barn. The light floods in from the left, via gaps in the roofing out of shot.
This black and white medium format photograph depicts a large white horse standing perpendicular to the camera. A femdom dressed in leather sits bareback on the horse, looking at the viewer. A masked submissive man in all black and leather kneels on the grass by the horses shoulder, facing the camera. They are surrounded by trees and foliage.
This black and white medium format photograph depicts a large white horse standing perpendicular to the camera. A femdom dressed in leather sits bareback on the horse, looking at the viewer. A masked submissive man in all black and leather kneels on the grass by the horses shoulder, facing the camera. They are surrounded by trees and foliage.
Process

To illuminate the structural and aesthetic convergences between Kink/BDSM practice and equestrianism: the leather, the whips, the regalia, and the authority of a woman directing a large and powerful animal. Central to the work is an investigation of performance — the codified rituals, visual languages, and negotiated dynamics through which power is enacted, transferred, and transformed, visually and aurally through the soundscape and musings of the Femdom featured in XXXistential. This work takes a humanising approach to Queer identities that are often seen as deviant, instead proposing a rigorous and empathetic engagement with Queer kinky identities, resisting simplification in favour of complexity, agency, and lived experience.

Thesis: Unveiling The Queer Gaze: A Critical Examination of Queer Photographic and Visual Practices That Incorporate BDSM and Kink Aesthetics.

Thesis Abstract:
This thesis examines how queer photographers utilise BDSM, kink and fetish elements and aesthetics to construct a radical queer gaze, subverting
heteronormative visual culture and patriarchal power structures. This demonstrates how Queer artists transform stigmatised symbols and sexuality into powerful tools of visual empowerment, world making and social, cultural and political resistance. Drawing on theories surrounding gender performativity, the concept of abjection, the gaze and queer futurity, this thesis argues that the photographic practices utilised by Catherine Opie, Del LaGrace Volcano and Robert Mapplethorpe have done more than just document marginalised communities. They have created an archive of representation for queer bodies, their pleasure and their desires to assert their place within visual culture and society at large, making the invisible, visible. This demonstrates how the queer gaze operates as a subversive artistic intervention, demanding that viewers confront their complicity within heteronormative structures of power and desire, humanising their existence. These photographers and their practices provide historical precedent and ongoing inspiration for understanding how art can function as a site for social, cultural and political transformation while offering alternative visual narratives that seek to challenge heteronormativity and asserting the dignity of the queer existence.

This black and white photograph pictures the artist leaning against a graffiti wall and turning towards the camera
Susannah Appleby
BA (Hons) Photography + Visual Media

Susannah Appleby is a lens-based visual artist from Dublin. Their work spans analogue photography, darkroom processing and digital moving image. Their recent work is centred around the transformative and empowering dimensions of Queer Kink and BDSM practices. This sits within a broader practice which often examines intersecting themes surrounding identity, gender and sexuality. These inquiries are rooted by personal experience and the communities that shape them.

BA (Hons) Photography + Visual Media